Morgan Wallen performs at the 2023 Billboard Music Awards at Truist Park in Atlanta, Georgia. | Source: Christopher Polk / Getty
One of country music’s biggest stars wants everybody to know he’s not a racist more than two years after he was caught on video casually saying the N-word in a manner that suggested he was comfortable using the racist, anti-Black slur.
In a new interview with Billboard, Morgan Wallen issued yet another mea culpa over the 2021 viral incident in which he uttered the fateful word while speaking to people in his entourage.
“That person is definitely not the same person I am now,” Wallen insisted in the interview before explaining that he was mad that people thought he was racist after he used *checks notes* the most notoriously racist word in the English language.
“There’s no excuse. I’ve never made an excuse. I never will make an excuse,” Wallen says of using the slur. “I’ve talked to a lot of people, heard stories [about] things that I would have never thought about because I wasn’t the one going through it. And I think, for me, in my heart I was never that guy that people were portraying me to be, so there was a little bit of like, ‘Damn, I’m kind of actually mad about this a little bit because I know I shouldn’t have said this, but I’m really not that guy.’ I put myself in just such a sh-t spot, you know? Like, ‘You really messed up here, guy.’ If I was that guy, then I wouldn’t have cared. I wouldn’t have apologized. I wouldn’t have done any of that if I really was that guy that people were saying about me.”
Of course, what Wallen did not recall was how he reportedly never made good on his pledge on Good Morning America to donate $500,000 to Black-led organizations and activism groups, suggesting that — perhaps, like the Billboard interview — was a PR stunt in the form of empty promises.
At the time, the Black Music Action Coalition admitted to Rolling Stone that the portion of the money they had received “seems exceptionally misleading” compared to the $500,000 that was mentioned in the GMA interview that name-dropped BMAC specifically. Rolling Stone even went as far as to contact 56 other Black-led or Black-founded charities on a state, regional and/or national scale. None reported getting any kind of monetary donation from Wallen or his team.
Rolling Stone also found that Wallen had been doing charity concerts and shows that raised $725,000 for victims of the Humphreys County flood in Tennessee but made virtually no attempt to give that same love to the community he offended the most.
It was in that context that Wallen’s latest PR push to revise a documented moment in history appeared in Billboard.
This is America.
SEE ALSO:
Glen Kuiper Can’t Understand Why N-Word ‘Mispronunciation’ Got Him Fired As MLB Announcer
